Navy: 1st 'hybrid' 'copter unit with drones

Pilots will fly traditional and unmanned helicopters

People look over the unmanned drone called Fire Scout at the establishment ceremony for the Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 35 at NAS North Island on Friday in San Diego, California. The squadron is the Navy's first combining man and unmanned aircraft.
— Eduardo Contreras

People look over the unmanned drone called Fire Scout at the establishment ceremony for the Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 35 at NAS North Island on Friday in San Diego, California. The squadron is the Navy's first combining man and unmanned aircraft.
— Eduardo Contreras

The Navy on Thursday established its first aircraft squadron made up of both traditional helicopters and remotely piloted drones, joining other U.S. services in using the cheaper, virtually indefatigable but controversial unmanned vehicles.

Saying the future is now, the Navy expects the Coronado squadron to make its first deployment in early 2014 on the littoral combat ship Fort Worth, with two Fire Scout unmanned vehicles and one traditional Seahawk helicopter.

The new squadron is Helicopter Maritime Strike 35, “the Magicians.” Its pilots will fly the drones from a control room inside the ship, in addition to their regular piloting duties.

Vice Adm. David Buss, commander of the Navy’s air forces, said the unmanned helicopters — small, boxy, windowless aircraft — can fly for eight hours and travel 110 nautical miles from home base. Already, their infrared cameras can do surveillance. In the future, the Navy plans to put weapons on them.

“That’s some real reach and endurance that we desperately need,” Buss said in a ceremony in a North Island Naval Air Station hangar decorated by a wall-to-ceiling American flag and filled with both active and retired aviators.

“I really believe this is the Navy’s future,” he said. “Because we’re bringing these two capabilities together at a time when we really need both manned and unmanned systems.”

The Magicians squadron will be made up of eight MH-60R Seahawks and 10 MQ-8B Fire Scouts. However, the Fire Scouts will reside at the Rancho Bernardo campus of Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor that designs them, said Cmdr. Christopher Hewlett, the squadron’s commanding officer.

Also, don’t expect to see the 24-foot unmanned helicopters flying over San Diego. A spokesman for Buss’ office said the current plan is to truck the Fire Scout to the ship pier for deployments. Test flights will occur in restricted air space over Point Mugu in Ventura County.

The Navy sees a business case for unmanned aerial vehicles, which have been used extensively by other military branches in Afghanistan for both surveillance and fire power.

The Fire Scout model to be used by the Magicians costs about $10 million, while the price tag for a MH-60 Seahawk is $33 million plus the risk to the lives of the four-person crew.

But the Fire Scout has had a shaky performance record as the Navy tested it in Afghanistan and on ships off South America and the African coast. The drone’s surveillance abilities did help catch drug runners and pirates. But after two crashes in 2012, Navy officials called an “operational pause” for the Fire Scout.

A Pentagon report on the drone’s deployment aboard the frigate Halyburton said the craft completed only half its missions.

Buss acknowledged those problems Thursday.

“As with any new system, you work your way through the bugs early on. … We’re getting stronger every day,” he said. “So I would say by the time this squadron deploys …. we will have many of the bugs worked out.”

Defense analyst and author Norman Friedman said the Navy probably wants to test the unmanned Fire Scout and the manned Seahawk side by side to answer the question of which works best for various missions.

“The pilots are not going to be happy with this. Pilots are very important in the military services. They absolutely dominate in the Air Force; they are very important in the Navy. You could argue unmanned vehicles are a threat to them,” said Friedman, author of the 2010 book “Unmanned Combat Air Systems.”

“The Air Force is trying to overcome that by having a pilot on the ground flying each airplane. But when the Army flies them without pilots, they seem to be much more reliable. Oh, by the way, it’s much cheaper.”

Buss, a former A-6 Intruder flight officer and the Navy’s “air boss,” said he and his counterparts are still mulling what level of experience is required to run a drone.

“This isn’t just about Fire Scout, this is about how we operate unmanned systems at the tactical level in the future,” he said.

“Do we need winged pilots to be operators? Can we use enlisted operators? The ink has not dried on any set of criteria on that.”

As it stands, the Magicians pilots will be expected to do a round-robin of cockpit flying, resting, then operating the Fire Scout. Similarly, enlisted crew members will fly their shifts in the Seahawk, come back and rest, then operate the Fire Scout’s surveillance system.

Asked if that means twice as much work, one Magicians pilot said, “We’re still working that out.”

Hewlett, the squadron’s skipper, said he’ll have an lieutenant commander overseeing the crew’s rest time so they don’t get overloaded.

Lt. Kevin Shikuma, a 10-year Navy pilot, said he thinks learning the Fire Scout will be a breeze. And he’s happy to be on the cutting edge.

“From what I hear, the UAV is a lot easier to fly. It’s very automated so it’ll be more like running a mouse and a keyboard instead of stick-and-rudder skills that the helicopter requires,” he said.

Will he miss his cockpit time?

“We do love to fly, and now our time will be split between both. But I’m sure we’ll remain proficient in both,” Shikuma said.

Even as the military has seen the effectiveness of land-based Predator drones in making surgical strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, some Americans have started to oppose the idea of “killer drones” on moral grounds.

The Northrop Grumman San Diego facility was the site of protests last month by anti-drone activists.

But the Navy, after being somewhat late to enter the drone game, is hitting the gas pedal.

It plans to buy up to 168 Fire Scouts. Twenty-three of the first-generation MQ-8B version are already purchased, said a Naval Air Systems Command spokeswoman.

And 28 of the larger C version have been authorized for purchase to support special-operations troops. Those will operate from destroyers, at first. Some of the Fire Scout B’s will also operate off frigates with special operations.

The Navy is also poised in coming weeks to do the first aircraft carrier-based test of its unmanned fighter jet model, the X-47B.